I try to stay out of these .flac discussions because it's like a Democrat showing up at the Republican Convention, but touting .flac for its compression is silly when you consider that storage is dirt cheap and virtually unlimited for anyone above the poverty level.

Rather, it's like an alien showing up among a bunch of not-so-respectful heathens, listening to their jokes and not realizing that what they are mocking are dogma that someone actually believes in. You just missed the entire 'but FLAC has lower bitrate!' argument for going uncompressed.

By the way, with .wav, I would need one more hard drive. And two more for backups. That's $300 in drives. When I started ripping, drives were half the size, and I could easily have needed a new PSU too. FLAC has likely saved me some $700-ish in drives (and offered tagging support as bonus) -- for free. Now go to the Republican convention and call it 'silly', and there's certainly going to be someone mumbling 'yeah, Communism ...'. (Or 'nothing but pure, simple Communism' if you happen to bump into Buford T. Justice.)

If someone feels the need to abuse themselves with itunes then by all means use ALAC.. I don't have any axe to grind about ALAC since it's an open and royalty free codec. If such a person ever wants to experience the freedom outside the Apple prison walls then they can freely transcode from ALAC to FLAC if they want to use devices that support the latter and not the former. All it costs is CPU time. There are plenty of free utilities to do the transcode.

I earn well above the poverty level and have several TB of storage capacity in my home. I still don't see a point in wasting space just for the sake of wasting space. Hard drives still cost money and I'd rather spend that extra $50 on my wife, or save it, than to buy an extra hard drive or to purchase a larger than necessary hard drive because I insist on saving my music in an uncompressed form. My piddly music collection is only about 100GB, but the 30-40GB or so I save using FLAC will allow me to use the extra space for other things. It allows me to use smaller external drives to backup my collection, or save money by paying for less storage on an internet rsync mirror, not to mention making the initial backup quicker.

Multiply that by a much larger collection of say 1TB, then the space savings become very significant at 300-400GB.

Also, my cable internet connection would be stressing it's upstream bandwidth limit to stream uncompressed PCM audio where the usual peak of 1.1-1.2Mbps for FLAC gives more headroom to handle network fluctuations. (not that I would stream in FLAC as even that is a shameful waste of bandwidth. I usually transcode on the fly to Vorbis -q2 for streaming)

QUOTE (jayess @ Aug 29 2012, 17:49)

A more relevant question is does flac improve the sound of music over wav?

Nope. Nor does WAV improve the sound quality over FLAC.. Lossless is lossless.

LOL, these comments are exactly what I was talking about. I could have said it would be like Brady showing up at the NRA in his wheelchair and still got the same results.

Would you like to actually respond to people’s replies to your post now, or do you just plan on continuing to do silly dances?

QUOTE

Ford vs. Chevy. Windows vs. Linux. Etc. Etc. To each their own.

If you’re saying this to shore up statements like the below, it’s even more irrelevant than your prior analogy; rudimentary aspects of data theory, like any other scientific fact, are not a matter of opinion.

QUOTE

A more relevant question is does flac improve the sound of music over wav?

Relevant to nothing. Perhaps you would benefit from some basic research about digital audio concepts and about the rules of this site. In case that helps, I’ll withhold for the moment my suggestion for what to do if it doesn’t.

Didn't know that an each had a their. Check my sig if you can't figure out what I'm trying to tell you.

Personally I like to base decisions on compelling reasons. I don't see one from you as to why someone should choose an uncompressed format over a compressed one. The latter is what the poll should have said, BTW. AIFF is no less valid than wave just as ALAC is no less valid than FLAC (or any other varieties).

PS: Feel free to latch on to my first paragraph in order to avoid the second one.

This post has been edited by greynol: Aug 29 2012, 23:39

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Breath is found in waveform and spectral plots;DR figures too, of course.

Unless Iím just being naÔvely literal in my interpretation of the written word, this suggests that we somehow havenít been clear enough in our answers. If so, I donít know how much more we can do! Audibility and significance do not enter into consideration at all. Decompressing a lossless format, which always occurs without active invocation during playback or transcoding, yields exactly the same audio. There is no chance of the result being audibly, inaudibly, significantly, insignificantly, or in any other way different.

QUOTE

Follow up question! Is it alright if I just convert my already ripped cds from .wav to .flac? or is it any better to rip it directly to .flac? Just making sure lol

For the same reason, it doesnít matter, and re-ripping/-converting would simply represent an unnecessary consumption of time.

Iím glad that youíve gotten the answers you were looking for, but they were already available in abundance elsewhere. I hope some future member with the same questions finds this thread or one of its many predecessors before backing people into assembling yet another, slightly different () copy of it.

Well, to those who insist that .wav is better because it is an uncompressed format ...

... shouldn't Microsoft's compressed folders feature for NTFS degrade the .wav much less than .zipping, since it is nowhere near the same efficiency?

I try to stay out of these .flac discussions because it's like a Democrat showing up at the Republican Convention, but touting .flac for its compression is silly when you consider that storage is dirt cheap and virtually unlimited for anyone above the poverty level.

Until the big players adopt .flac it's still a fringe format.

Does Itunes (not that I would load that crap software on my system) play .flac file?

Rip to wave then later convert wave to flac is no different than ripping to flac as far as the audio is concerned.

The difference is that if the waves do not have tag information and you want this information in your converted flacs then that information will have to be added later as a separate step. This may be very time-consuming process unless the information you want is contained in the paths and file names of the wave files (as was already said). In general when ripping to flac the files are also directly populated with tag information as part of the process.

QUOTE (db1989 @ Aug 29 2012, 16:10)

I hope some future member with the same questions finds this thread or one of its many predecessors before backing people into assembling yet another, slightly different () copy of it.

Don't hold your breath.

This post has been edited by greynol: Aug 30 2012, 02:58

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Breath is found in waveform and spectral plots;DR figures too, of course.

Didn't know that an each had a their. Check my sig if you can't figure out what I'm trying to tell you.

Personally I like to base decisions on compelling reasons. I don't see one from you as to why someone should choose an uncompressed format over a compressed one. The latter is what the poll should have said, BTW. AIFF is no less valid than wave just as ALAC is no less valid than FLAC (or any other varieties).

PS: Feel free to latch on to my first paragraph in order to avoid the second one.

Well, I said "to each their own" rather than "to each his own" because it's more inclusive. You do realize that some women also choose .wav over .flac, right?

Anyway, I have to break in the two new amps that I had arrive today. Do you think I should use .flac files to do that, or use .wav and contribute the saved processor power to SETI?

Pronoun agreement is your OT lesson for the day. Each is singular. Their is plural. Proper English grammar dictates that you use the masculine "his" as the default when the subject of the gender is unknown. If you wish to be grammatically and politically correct the proper phrase is, "to each his or her own."

Regarding your other question, I will point out that the concept of breaking-in is largely an placebophile myth, though I suppose it extends beyond placebophiles whether they may be men or women. How you choose to spend the miniscule amount of processing power is your business.

Thank you for dodging the part where you provide a compelling reason why someone should use wave over flac.

This post has been edited by greynol: Aug 30 2012, 05:13

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Breath is found in waveform and spectral plots;DR figures too, of course.

I don't really approve of how the OP asked a for opinions and some users started to bash WAV users. Wasn't it enough that the poll itself was nearly unanimously in favour of FLAC? It's puzzling to me why moderators leave a topic like this open, but when a different opinion comes up bash the poster to the ground. If you have pre-decided the outcome of the discussion, why not just tell the OP your "correct" opinion and close the topic? If you really don't want this kind of discussion, set-up a wiki page, have some stickies on the forum, and close this kind of discussion before it takes off.

So that my post will not only be meta-discussion: The most compelling argument in favor of WAV has not really been stated, the ubiquitous support in every audio player on every platform.

Do you think I should use .flac files to do that, or use .wav and contribute the saved processor power to SETI?

Just for the record: I didn't made the actual math, but in the whole process you'll likely end up wasting more power, stricto sensu, to spin, write and read a drive while using wav than to feed your CPU decoding FLAC...

The most compelling argument in favor of WAV has not really been stated, the ubiquitous support in every audio player on every platform.

Yep. There is/was a lot of players that .mp3 and .wav only (maybe also .wma lossy, but hardly lossless).

Now in case i would want to play .wav over my car stereo: Copying from FLAC (from my computer) to WAV is no slower than copying WAV to WAV, actually, as FLAC decodes faster than my hard drive reads. Not to mention, much faster than can be written to any USB 2-device.

BTW: .wav is a container format which can contain a few lossy codecs too, but I assume that ď.wav supportĒ in portable devices is largely limited to the good'ole PCM?

My piddly music collection is only about 100GB, but the 30-40GB or so I save using FLAC will allow me to use the extra space for other things. It allows me to use smaller external drives to backup my collection, or save money by paying for less storage on an internet rsync mirror, not to mention making the initial backup quicker.

I used to say that for collections in that order of magnitude, using lossless compression could mean that you got your entire collection on a portable player (in your case: the 80 gigabytes iPod available some years ago). Using lossless for portable use is maybe not well-justified, and using a portable (theft-prone) as your backup is maybe not advisable, but having that as an additional backup is certainly not stupid.

Well, nowadays 120 GB drives are given away, I guess.

(As for internet backup, you might consider AudioSafe by Spoon (the dBpoweramp / AccurateRip developer) -- it is supposed to be free-until-you-need-it.)

So that my post will not only be meta-discussion: The most compelling argument in favor of WAV has not really been stated, the ubiquitous support in every audio player on every platform.

If it had been closed then you would not have had the opportunity to present this reason.

I'll gladly field your moderation complaints via PM if you like, or alternatively you can create another topic. I don't feel obliged to engage in a serious discussion with you about it here, let alone attempt to seek your approval.

This post has been edited by greynol: Aug 30 2012, 14:10

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Breath is found in waveform and spectral plots;DR figures too, of course.